Almost 50 years ago, Patty Hearst’s kidnapping captivated viewers across the country.
Roger Rapoport covered it all.
“It was a worldwide story; everywhere you looked people were talking about it and writing about it,” Rapoport said. “I was one of those people writing about it from the moment it happened.”
From the search to the botched ransom requests and even Hearst herself turning to a life of crime alongside her kidnappers—he followed it closely.
With the benefit of that coverage and a lifetime of interviews with multiple parties involved, Rapoport is ready to relay the tale.
“I’ve had connections to people in this case for a long time, and my interest throughout all of this was the wildly differing points of view I was getting from people involved,” he said. “So I decided that I wanted to take those views and blend them into this sort of historical fiction that was very much based on true events.”
His book, Searching for Patty Hearst, takes the real-world events surrounding the diversity of perspectives about the kidnapping, search, criminal trial, and Hearst’s pardoning.
“Giving each of them equal time in the story was a very rigorous task,” Rapoport said with a laugh. “It relied a lot on having done interviews with all of the sources and then doing a story of cross-reflection on them.”
The book will be released on Jan. 16, 2024, accompanied by author talks across California, including one at the San Luis Obispo Library on Jan. 31.
The history of how Searching for Patty Hearst came about might be as interesting as the event itself, Rapoport said, because it wasn’t his first attempt at writing about the subject.
“I originally wrote a nonfiction book on this whole ordeal with Patty Hearst’s then fiancé, Steve Weed,” he said, noting that the book was eventually shelved after the partnership fell through and Weed sued to block publication of the novel.
Nevertheless, Rapoport continued to interview and dig for other perspectives, landing an interview with her kidnapper, Bill Harris, and eventually Hearst herself.
“Being able to talk to both the kidnapper and Patty gave me two completely different perspectives that painted the whole incident in a much wider view,” he said. “It changed how I had originally planned on structuring the novel because you ended up with these two different views that both held a little truth in each of them.”
Those perspectives influenced his choice to make the novel fiction rather than going straight to nonfiction as he had attempted in the past.
“A lot of people ask, well, why didn’t I just go and do another different nonfiction, and the first answer I give is, well, I did, it just never came out, but the other answer is I wanted to try something different,” he said.
He feels that catering to the historical facts that he observed and the various perspectives years later of the people who experienced those facts will appeal to both fans of the case and newcomers.
“There are two distinct audiences I am going for here,” he said. “I think if it were just pure nonfiction, it wouldn’t be nearly as interesting because I wouldn’t be able to include some of these perspectives since they outright contradict each other and the reader would end up discounting them.”
Rapoport said the case is an interesting look into the impact Hearst’s great-grandfather William Rudolph Hearst’s newspaper empire had on the sensationalism that surrounded the kidnapping.
“It’s ironic that years after he had passed, his descendent would be involved in a case his papers would have spread like wildfire,” he said. “A lot of what he did when he first started in the early 1900s was building up narratives from cases like this.”
Whether readers are searching for answers or looking for new perspectives surrounding the case, Rapoport said he hopes the novel will bring a new audience to what he considers to be one of the most interesting local news stories.
“It shines a light on one of the most influential families on the Central Coast and the chaos that followed the kidnapping of one of their family members,” he said. “It’s an opportunity for younger readers to learn the history of one of the most captivating events that happened in a place they can go and visit right now.”
Reach Staff Writer Adrian Vincent Rosas from the Sun’s sister paper, New Times, at [email protected].
